51-year-old Dr. Joe Smith was a fixture around the Lancaster, South Carolina community for many years. He had a practice as a general practitioner, worked as the jail physician for Chester County and the city, and the assistant coroner for Lancaster County.
He’d grown up in Anderson, where his father was employed by Swift and Company. After graduating from high school, he joined the military. After a tour of duty, he entered medical school.
It was Bob Perry, the owner of Perry’s Pharmacy, which was located on York Street next to Smith’s office that first noticed something was wrong. He was used to seeing Smith in and out of the pharmacy multiple times a day.
Perry saw Smith early that Monday morning, but not the next day. He began inquiring at Smith’s office about his whereabouts on Tuesday. At first his staff thought Smith had gone to Anderson to help assist getting his mother into a nursing home, but then she called the office on Tuesday and said she hadn’t seen him. Perry went to the sheriff, and Parks decided to do a welfare check on his friend and colleague at his riverfront home south of Fort Lawn in Chester County, about five miles west of Lancaster. Joe was separated from his wife Betty at the time and lived alone.
A Shocking Discovery
There, around 7 p.m, Detective Jim Boswell, former Fort Lawn Police Chief Kenneth Eagle and Joe Smith’s son-in-law Daniel Bailey went to the home. They removed a windowpane from the kitchen door, unlocked the door, and went inside. There, they found Smith deceased in his bedroom, underneath a pile of clothes taken from his closet and an electric blanket, which was still turned on. He had been shot multiple times in the chest and the head with two .38-caliber pistols.
“I couldn’t help thinking about the hundreds of crime scenes and natural deaths that we had been together investigating and here I was investigating his death,” said Lancaster County Sheriff Nae Parks.
He described Smith as having the kind of analytical mind necessary for investigating death scenes and the contacts around the state to get answers quickly.
The preliminary autopsy report showed the wounds were not self inflicted. The presence of the electric blanket made it difficult to pinpoint the physician’s time of death. Investigators found no signs of forced entry in his one-story brick home.
The Case Goes Cold
To the general public, it appeared the case had stalled. News reports of what was happening during the investigation were non-existent for at least a year. Of course, we’ll never really know what investigators suspected or knew or what kind of physical evidence they were hoping to find before issuing an arrest warrant.
Two agents from the State Law Enforcement Division were assigned to Smith’s unsolved murder case in September of 1980. Laboratory tests determined Smith had been shot by two .38-caliber pistols, both of which he owned. One was found in his kitchen, and the other was recovered in the attic of the home by the doctor’s son, Joe Smith III, several days after the murder. Smith’s colleagues at the White Springs Memorial Hospital in Lancaster last saw him on the morning of October 29, 1979, when he helped to deliver a baby. A woman named Pearl Chandler, who said she worked as Smith’s receptionist and bookkeeper, told police she saw him later that day when she borrowed his car to go shopping in Rock Hill. Pearl said she returned his car later that day, but didn’t see him. She got into her own car and returned home.
A year after the murder, Chester County Sheriff Bobby Orr said the investigation was ongoing. In fact, he told the media that he was confident the crime would be solved, and an arrest would be made. That arrest was made more than six months later.
A Woman Scorned is Arrested for Murder
On May 22, 1981, a year and a half after Dr. Joe Smith Jr. his death in his home, police arrested 42-year-old Pearl Chandler, a nurse from Lancaster and charged her with the murder. This was the Pearl Chandler who said she’d borrowed Joe’s car during the time friends and colleagues noticed he was missing. They also charged her with several different forgery counts. In a strange twist, Pearl Chandler was the ex-wife of Richard Chandler, Senior, who was the Lancaster County coroner at the time of Joe’s death. She’d been separated from her husband when Joe was murdered, and had been in a relationship with Joe until the weeks prior.
Sheriff Orr said the warrant was issued based on an intensive investigation by the Chester and Lancaster sheriffs’ departments, the State Law Enforcement Division and the Bureau of Drug Control of the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.
The Bureau of Drug Control charged Pearl with two counts of obtaining drugs by forged prescriptions and one count of obtaining controlled substances by a forged prescription. SLED charged her with five counts of forging checks.
A circuit court judge set bond for Pearl at $10,000. She quickly posted the bond and was released.
Her trial began in late October of 1981 and lasted three days. The jury consisted of four men and eight women. The prosecution presented 62 pieces of evidence in Pearl Chandler’s trial and called 28 witnesses to testify.
Prosecutor John Justice told reporters his plan was to present Pearl Chandler’s motives for murder as “greed and scorn.” Bobby Orr said his office found several checks from Joe Smith’s account deposited in Pearl’s bank account and used to pay her bills several days after he was murdered. Marvin Dawson, a State Law Enforcement Division handwriting expert, told the jury that five checks and several prescriptions with Joe Smith’s signature had been forged by Pearl Chandler.
A Circumstantial Case
The case against Pearl was largely circumstantial. Here are a few details that came out during the trial:
Sheriff Orr said investigators found a blood-spattered yellow plastic cup containing remnants of vodka and cherries in the bathroom at Joe Smith’s house. Gwendolyn Parker, who also worked in Joe’s office, testified that Pearl often drank from a cup with clear liquid and cherries in it.
On October 15, 1979, Joe had fired Pearl from her receptionist/bookkeeper position and called police to help remove her from the office. He was murdered 14 days later. While Pearl was a receptionist at the time of Joe’s death, she went on to receive her training as a nurse in the year and a half prior to her arrest.
On October 29, 1979, Pearl Chandler made several calls to let people know Joe Smith would not be at work. At 10:20 a.m. Gwendolyn Parker’s mother said Pearl phoned her daughter at 8:30 a.m. saying the office was going to be closed for fumigation, and then called back an hour later to say Joe was going to Anderson.
In Joe Smith’s car parked in his driveway, investigators found his billfold and checkbook in a suitcase. The billfold was empty of money but contained his identification cards, and five checks were missing from the back of the checkbook.
Ballistics tests confirmed Joe Smith was killed with two of his own .38-caliber pistols.
A Perplexing Letter
The prosecution presented a letter she wrote to Joe smith four days after he fired her as his receptionist. The letter had been kept in a safety deposit box at the Central Carolina Bank in Lancaster and was discovered in September of 1980. The letter read:
Joe,
I needed the money to pay Rick’s tuition.
Sorry I thought you were more serious about me. I feel hard but love you so much. In case anything happens to me your ring will be worth at least $3,000. I had it appraised. And you have life insurance on me. This should help repay any trouble I caused you.
I was not as bad as you thought and didn’t do many, many things I got credit for. But for some reason you have made up your mind about me. You were my world what I lived for. Children have their own lives but I had centered mine around you. Sorry about being a pest I loved you more than life. I’m putting this in writing in case something happens to me.
I don’t know why Sissy set out to hurt me, but she said she would win and I guess I thought your love for me was stronger.
Remember you said you were possessive and wanted me to yourself and I believed you. Now I have nothing—my family says ‘I tried to tell you’ and Betty called and said ‘ha, ha, ha.’ Money will buy anything, even Sissy—I guess that’s the answer.
There’s another box that will be opened in your presence and you and everyone will find a lot of answers to your questions and what I’m guilty of—I saved your life twice—you might miss me someday.
Forever Love, Pearl
The letter was found along with a pink Valentine’s Day Car Joe had sent to Pearl. The Betty she referred to in the letter was Joe Smith’s estranged wife, and Sissy the nickname for Joe’s other employee, Gwendolyn Parker. From what I can tell in this letter, Joe must have figured out Pearl was embezzling money from the office and fired her. Maybe Gwendolyn Parker tipped him off that something wasn’t right with the financial records. The letter reads to me as if Pearl was planning to harm herself, especially because she mentions the ring and life insurance policy with Joe as the beneficiary possibly? I can only guess about that, because I wasn’t able to find a deeper discussion of the letter and what it meant in any of the articles I found.
Pearl’s son, Richard Chandler, Jr. testified he found a ring belonging Joe Smith in a freezer at his mother’s house in Elgin, on top of a package of meet. The freezer was in the carport of her home in Lancaster. When he was first questioned by SLED agents, he told them he’d found the ring in a car his mother used. Then he changed the story to the freezer. He told attorneys at the trial he’d initially lied because he was questioned in front of his mother, and he was worried about upsetting her. He also said Joe Smith and Pearl had been dating for two years at that point.
The ring was a diamond-studded, horseshoe-shaped piece of jewelry Joe Smith liked to wear to horse shows. The center of the ring featured a horse’s head. Richard said he held onto the ring after he initially found it and didn’t tell his mother he had it. His reasoning was that she was quite upset about Joe’s death. Her son said he wanted to keep the ring because it was the only thing his mother had to remember her former lover by.
Joe Lancaster’s Autopsy Results
Charleston pathologist Dr. Sandra Conradi told jurors Joe Smith was killed as he lay in bed clothed in a t-shirt. Four of the eight bullets that hit him were fired from close range. She found powder burns on his skin next to his sideburns. The first two bullets that hit him near the temple did extensive damage to his brain. She concluded that although the first two bullets likely would have caused his death, the six additional shots were fired into his body while his heart continued to pump blood.
Before the jury began their deliberations, Pearl’s attorney Berry Mobley called for a directed verdict in favor of his client because of insufficient evidence. 13th Circuit Judge Frank Eppes denied the motion.
Pearl did not testify on her own behalf and her attorneys did not offer a rebuttal after the prosecution’s closing arguments. The jury foreman, Paul Jones, said these two facts factored into their guilty verdict. Pearl and her defense team offered up no reason why she should be found innocent. They didn’t even call any witnesses of their own.
Jones also said the jury had discussed whether there could have been more than one person firing the guns that killed Joe. Pearl’s defense attorneys mentioned a former employee of Joe’s or his brother-in-law could have been suspects. Members of the jury asked about the blood spatter on three walls of the bedroom at the crime scene.
Pearl Chandler Found Guilty
On October 28, 1981, after two and a half hours, the jury returned a guilty verdict in the murder of Dr. Joe Smith. His widow, Betty, told the media the family was happy about the verdict. His son said, “We were uncertain how it was going to turn out. We kept our hopes up. We had talked it over and decided that no matter what, we would abide by the decision of the court. We didn’t want to start a long-term feud between the families or have feelings of revenge.”
If you’ll remember, Pearl Chandler was questioned a few days after Joe Smith’s body was discovered. She wasn’t charged with the crime until a year and a half later. Because of that delay, her attorneys suggested the sheriff’s department may have felt pressured into making an arrest.
Not so, said Chester County Sheriff Robert H. Orr. He told The State, “There was no pressure put upon me. I don’t bend to pressure. If any pressure had been exerted by anyone that pressure came from me to get the investigation completed so we were able to get a warrant.
I wasn’t able to find any photos of Dr. Joe Smith or Pearl Chandler in all the media coverage I read about this case. But I will say Pearl was often described as “an attractive blonde,” which I always find interesting when reading about these older cases involving female defendants and the way they are covered. The Herald described the defendant and the scene in the courtroom as the verdict was read like this:
The attractive, blue-eyed blonde, wearing a gray herringbone dress and blue blouse, displayed no emotion during sentencing or while jurors individually answered “yes” during a poll of the jury at the end of the trial. The petite woman wept openly as she was led to jail by Chester County sheriff’s deputies.
Pearl Chandler didn’t spend one full night in custody before being transferred to Chester County Hospital. Records showed she was admitted to the emergency room on October 29, treated and released. What she was treated for is unknown. She spent the rest of the night in the jail and was transferred the next day to the South Carolina Department of Corrections Center in Columbia.
The week after her conviction Pearl’s attorneys announced they would be appealing the verdict. I noticed they told The Herald that they didn’t believe the 43-year-old church organist deserved to spend the next 20 years behind bars. This was the first time I ever saw her described as a church organist. Attorney Berry Mobley said he didn’t know what grounds they would base the appeal on but had 30 days to prepare a “case of exceptions.”
After that, I couldn’t find any reporting on what happened in the appeals process. In fact, it’s difficult to locate any further information about Pearl Hunter Chandler. I would assume she served out most of her sentence and was paroled after close to 20 years, but that’s only an assumption. Her name is a very common one in the Carolinas and I’m guessing she changed it at some point. Maybe Pearl Chandler came out of prison remorseful and a rehabilitated woman, but at this point, I don’t know.
The Charlotte News
MD’s Murder Double Blow to Lancaster
November 1, 1979
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-charlotte-news-dr-smith/49944275
The Greenville News
November 1, 1979
Assistant coroner was murdered, sheriff says
https://www.newspapers.com/image/189128258
The Charlotte Observer
November 2, 1980
Who Killed Dr. Smith?
https://www.newspapers.com/image/623602581
The State
November 3, 1980
Chester County Sheriff Plans Arrest in Murder
https://www.newspapers.com/image/750783675
The Index Journal
September 9, 1980
Death probe ordered
https://www.newspapers.com/image/69516318
Pearl Hunter Chandler
Arrested in May 1981
Anderson Independent Mail
May 25, 1981
Woman charged with murder of former Anderson resident
https://www.newspapers.com/image/810621933
The Herald
May 23, 1981
Police charge nurse in doctor’s slaying
https://www.newspapers.com/image/755773312
The State
October 28, 1981
Love letters read at murder trial
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The Herald
October 28, 1971
Jury deliberates fate of slain doctor’s lover
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The Times and Democrat
October 28, 1971
Handwriting expert gives trial testimony
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The Gaffney Ledger
October 28, 1971
Woman wrote love letter to doctor
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The State
October 29, 1971
Mrs. Chandler gets life for killing doctor
Page 1
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The State
October 30, 1981
Jury Finds Woman Guilty of Murder in Death of Lover
https://www.newspapers.com/image/751051614
The Herald
Pearl Chandler conviction to be appealed
November 6, 1981
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Pearl Chandler was paroled sometime after her 20-year sentence. Whether she is still living or not is unknown.
